Social safety nets

The opportunity to take responsibility

YOU will find this difficult to believe, readers, but Mitt Romney has been caught on video saying something potentially damaging to his campaign. Yesterday, Mother Jones ran extensive video of Mr Romney speaking at a fundraiser and responding to a wide variety of questions. The material is rich with statements he no doubt wishes he could have back, but this is the bit that's receiving the most attention at the moment:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax…[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

The citation of "the 47%" isn't that odd for a Republican; it became something of a standard GOP response to Occupy Wall Street's "we are the 99%" slogan. It is startling to hear the figure placed in this context, however, particularly by a major party candidate for president just weeks before an election.

The remarks are being criticised by pundits from across the political spectrum. Ezra Klein's Wonkblog has a thorough dissection of the comments, and David Brooks rather impressively managed to build a column around them in time for this morning's paper. There's plenty to dislike. The 47% of people that pay no income tax include lots of people who nonetheless pay tax. For the working poor, payroll taxes are a substantial share of income. It also includes people who aren't currently paying income tax but who soon will—like students—or who already spent a long career paying into federal coffers—retirees. And some of those paying no income tax are very rich people who derive most of their income from investments. A not insignificant share of these moochers are Republican voters. It should be obvious how incredibly wrong it is to characterise most of them as unwilling to take personal responsibility, as blithely dependent on the government, and as in hock to the Democratic Party as a result.

Moreover, many of these people have fallen off the tax rolls thanks to Republican policies. It was Ronald Reagan's decision to implement Milton Friedman's negative income tax, in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit, that makes it possible for many of this 47% to avoid paying income tax. Not only was that a GOP policy, it was a good policy and it worth defending, not using to stoke resentment among the well off.

Those arguments account for most of the scathing treatment he's receiving this morning. But I was also interested to see his comments last night at a hastily called damage-control press conference:

These lines in particular stood out to me:

Do you believe in a government-centred society that provides more and more benefits, or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams? ...

We have a very different approach the president and I between a government-dominated society and a society driven by free people pursuing their dreams...

To me, this perfectly illustrates the massive blind spot in current GOP orthodoxy. The belief that there is an irreconcilable conflict between government benefits and the freedom to pursue dreams can only arise among those who have never had to worry about the reality of equality of opportunity in America. For most Americans, public schools are a critical piece of the machinery of economic mobility. Things like unemployment insurance and social security, meagre though they are, sometimes mean the difference between destitution and the possiblity of a second chance or a non-wretched standard of living. For many Americans, the ability to even contemplate dreams for a better life is down to the small cushion and basic investments provided by governments, provided for precisely that reason, because an economy in which only those born with a comfortable financial position can invest in human capital and take entrepreneurial risks is doomed to class-based calcification.

America's welfare state is far from perfect. But it is necessary; indeed, it's hard to imagine a just and sustainable system of free enterprise without a robust social safety net. Republicans need to recognise this and acknowledge that the past three decades have meant rising income inequality and falling economic mobility alongside top marginal tax rates that are among the lowest of the postwar period. A party that can't come up with a better answer to this dynamic than to conclude that half of America simply isn't trying hard enough probably isn't a party destined or deserving of electoral success.

If *I* am getting a payment from the government, it is a valid safety net (or good public policy, or something that I have paid for and deserve). If *you* are getting a payment from the government, it is a hammock for a lazy bum.

America is "the land of opportunity". Until fairly recently, the accepted position of both parties was that we invest in people because we don't know where the next great idea and next great company will come from. That meant trying to create more "equality of opportunity". This was transformed in the political argument to accuse the Democrats of wanting "equality of outcome". No one in the political mainstream wants that, but that's the accusation, no matter how empty it is. It became a way of harnessing fear of spending and deficits into action: say the goal is "equality of outcome" and you can cut away those programs which you declare intend that. Label them "redistributionist" or "socialist".

The GOP is now, against its own history, defining "opportunity" as whatever happens happens. If you're born poor, tough. If you have one parent, tough. If you have a birth defect, tough. You can make it if you really try. Or at least some can and the rest, well, too bad. I don't think that's what Americans on the whole believe is right, but they're afraid: afraid of the deficit and what it might cost them personally, so rhetoric that labels people as "lucky duckies" because they're too poor to pay income tax makes people feel we're maintaining hordes of shiftless scum.

It isn't that there is a safety net. That's a bad phrase. The idea of social security is that a person has worked for decades and deserves to be able to eat more than cat food and to have heat in an apartment. The idea behind food stamps and aid to dependent children and much of Medicaid is that children are our future. Feed them, provide them with healthcare and they grow up to be responsible citizens. Don't and they grow up to be criminals.

These programs have always been about increasing opportunity. Even unemployment compensation is designed to be a temporary shelter for a family not as a permanent income for a single person. They aren't so much a "safety net" as an "opportunity net".

But in this climate and for many reasons, the GOP has become extremely focused on justifying the vagaries of life. Some people make it out of extreme hardship so we shouldn't help anyone. Some people overcome physical difficulties so we shouldn't help anyone. It becomes "if you fail, it's your fault".

As an aside, we see this kind of belief in other areas as well. One of my kids did a paper recently about the breast cancer movement's fixation on belief and how it has created a culture in which failing to believe strongly enough is your failure. It has become about the struggle and believing and less about the fact that this is cancer and some people die and others don't.

"it's hard to imagine a just and sustainable system of free enterprise..."
The current system is neither just, nor free enterprise, nor sustainable. Check out the Big EZ South for a look at our future.
Anyway, most of the transfer payments made by the federal government go to the middle class, not the poor.

I remember a news story from many years ago about over-representation of Asian American at California's universities. The reporter interviewed some white students, asking how they feel about the situation. Many said that it was unfair because the Asians study too hard. These kids have since grown up and are now running our country. To wit, here's a quote from the New York Times:

“While Michelle and the two girls go play tennis on Saturday afternoons, I go in the Oval Office, pretend I’m going to work, and then I switch on ‘Homeland.’ ”

In another era such an utterance would have been scandalous. Now it barely raises an eyebrow since it's become acceptable behavior among most Americans.

this is nonsensical horse crap. america became the land of opportunity when almost no safety net existed and it took a bunch of cold starving people coming over on a boat on the mere chance that somewhere out there they could forge a better life.

now the socialists want to redefine opportunity as a gold plated guarantee that everything you "deserve" you simply get. ever increasing %'s of the population pay no income tax, ever increasing %'s of the population are on the government dole.

maybe socialists can make their own phrase but its maliciously deceptive to steal a phrase like "land of opportunity" and permanently affix it to the concept of a bloated geriatric welfare state.

" So all the people who work for minimum wage or even a bit more for Burger King, Mc Donald's, Target, Walmart, chain grocery stores, the local mall etc etc are all freeloaders not worth bothering about. Most are just trying to get by, feed their families and get through life.Many work 2-3 jobs. But Romney treats them as worthless. As for the 47%,all of them are not democrats.Many are republicans working hard just to exist. Romney has just dissed a huge portion of this country.God help all the common ,hard working people if this man is elected. "

Is Romney the stupidest candidate ever to stand in a US presidential election? He's certainly the most heartless. Every time he opens his mouth he seems to say something stupid. God help us if he ever gets hold of nuclear weapons! Run for the hills!!

Why? Not all children born out of wedlock only have 1 parent. Many people "live together" in a successful relationship for years without getting married. Many children born in wedlock end up as part of a single parent family. Maintenance of children is not dependent on a church or government sanctified certificate.

Once republicans start arguing that, my plant should never be closed, my job never offshored and my union never curtialed, I'll agree I no longer need to pay into a government stafety net. Until then I'll continue to pay premium to insure myself aginst unemployement or illness or the possibiliy my pension provider is the next Enron.

I'm sick to death of the 1% arguing its nothing less than Stalinism Not to close a plant if thwen can be shown ot increase shareholder value by 0.5% then turn around and decry those who are now out of a job as worthless scroungers sucking at the government teat.

Simplest solution would be to allow it to cover younger and healthier people who would pay into the system more than they take out. But these people's premium revenues are reserved for private insurance company shareholders.

So the federal government and therefore the taxpayer gets put on the hook for every customer that the insurers think is not profitable. So the program loses money. And the insurers use the fact that the program loses money to say that it's too incompetent to be allowed to cover anyone but old people and poor people, who the insurers don't want.

Current US federal government spending, excluding defense, is about $9,000 per head per year, or $36,000 for a family of four. Given current tax take, and even assuming that defense can't be cut (nonsense, of course), the evil, beastly, savage fiscal conservatives are asking to lower that number to $5,500 per head per year, or $22,000 for a family of four, to balance the thing. Yes, I know, $2.3 trillion diet will really starve the beast, and reduce us to the law of the jungle!

A party that thinks that the solution to inequality is to continue to spend $10,000s per household per year with no appreciable results to show for it is a party that went to public school and failed arithmetic.

It's too bad that Republicans are phony fiscal conservatives, I really wish Romney deserved the criticism people are piling up on him.

I just checked my paystub - I already pay for Medicare, and that's on top of BCBS, which is a non-profit as I recall. I don't see how me using Medicare (that I currently don't use) would help its fiscal situation. Unless it charged me more money (higher taxes). I don't like the concept of health insurance, but if you want reform, I don't think your direction is a way to go.

If a man won't make a commitment to his offspring and the woman he supposedly loves, what kind of effort will he make in service to strangers? Fundamentally, economic activities involve people tending to the needs and desires of others. A nation of narcissistic douche-bags isn't going to see much economic growth.